With only one congressman and two senators, Vermont’s congressional delegation may be small.  But that isn’t stopping Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), and Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) from doling out big dollars–$236,830, to be exact–to members of their staffs.

As the Burlington Free Press reports:

Of the three lawmakers, Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, gave the most in bonuses. Twenty-nine of his personal office staffers received bonuses ranging from $1,500 to $5,000 last year, totaling $138,830. Leahy, who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee, also gave bonuses to 25 committee staffers, totaling $112,048.

Leahy’s spokesman, David Carle, said many other lawmakers use Leahy’s office salary structure “because it is flexible and fair and rewards good work.”

Sanders gave $2,000 bonuses to 32 people on his personal staff, totaling $64,000. He also gave $2,000 bonuses to two staffers on the Senate health subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging, which he chairs.

Rep. Peter Welch, a Democrat, gave each of his 17 staffers a $2,000 bonus, totaling $34,000. House office budgets are authorized by calendar year and Senate office budgets are authorized by fiscal year.

News of the taxpayer-funded big bonuses comes at a time when state budgets are being slashed, the nation’s unemployment is still above eight percent, and the U.S. government is $15 trillion in debt.

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In the face of strong national consumer spending and private sector employment gains, State Controller John Chiang released California’s December financial statement showing the General Fund is running a staggering cash deficit of $21 billion on an $88.5 billion budget. This imploding financial condition is a reflection of how California’s high businesses taxes and excessive regulations are accelerating the trend of businesses abandoning the state. According to Chiang:

“While we saw positive numbers in November, December’s totals failed to meet even the latest revenue projections. Coupled with higher spending tied to unrealized cost savings, these latest revenue figures create growing concern that legislative action may be needed in the near future to ensure that the State can meet its payment obligations.”

The above are “code words” that the state is financially dysfunctional and getting worse. The December report shows that compared to last year, California revenue, at $39.4 billion, is down by 11.2% due mostly to a 26.4% nose-dive in sales tax collection, and state spending of $52.3 billion is currently running 33% higher than the state’s revenue.

The Controller does not seem impressed that Governor Brown and the California State Legislature’s only solution to fix this budget mess is to relying on voters’ willingness to approve an initiative to raise the already hefty sales tax they pay by 13% and add another surtax on the wealthy to generate $6.9 billion in revenue. Even if the public shocks pollsters and actually passes the tax increase, the non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) calculated the initiative would only generate $4.8 billion per year. (more…)

This afternoon, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS)–a left-wing think tank based in Washington, DC–held a conference call to coordinate strategy among Occupy organizers, activists and supporters in the aftermath of the eviction of demonstrators in several cities.

From the Institute for Policy Studies website

IPS Executive Director John Cavanagh posed the following questions:

1. “How do we support the actual Occupy movement at this time… especially when some of the encampments have been shut down?”
2. “How do we expand the space for the ideas…that have been opened up by the Occupy movement?”

Cavanagh discussed the daily conference calls that Occupy organizers have been holding to coordinate strategy across the country, and urged participants to join in a national day of protest in solidarity with the activists who had been removed from Zuccotti Park in New York.

One of the sites providing information about local protests is november17.org, which is apparently affiliated with Van Jones’s Rebuilding the American Dream organization.

Cavanagh compared the Occupy protests with the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression, and suggested that both were protests against difficult economic conditions that the government failed to address. He also claimed that the Occupy movement was taking on the small-government, free-market legacy of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. (more…)

The media still seems baffled that prim and proper England would be almost brought to its knees by what the London Daily Mail newspaper referred to as “nihilistic and feral teenagers” rioters. For four days anarchistic youths “from all walks of life raced around the streets mindlessly and desperately hurling bricks, stones and bottles at the cops while looting here and setting bonfires there, leading the authorities on a merry chase of catch-as-catch-can as they tweeted their way from one strategic target to another.” The British Social Welfare State that Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative Party dismantled thirty years ago has come roaring back with 14 year of Labor Party rule.

Today’s British youth have been indoctrinated in school that Thatcher was an anti-democratic fascist, who denied the public their entitlements. It should not be surprising that this generation of “Mini-Me” leftists would act out now that Parliamentary control a broke U.K. has gone to the Conservative Party under David Cameron to return the nation to solvency.

It has been 21 years since Thatcher retired as British Prime Minister. During her 11 year reign as the “Iron Lady” she systematically reversed England’s precipitous economic and military decline. When the she became Prime Minister in 1979 the U.K. was in a severe recession. Violent riots broke out in the South London neighborhood of Brixton over demands for more social spending. Scores of buildings were burned and 2500 policemen were injured and as the violence raged. The rioting spread to Liverpool where over a four day period 150 buildings burned and 781 more police officers were injured. Police were finally forced to use CS gas for the first time on the British mainland to quell the unrest.

The Iron Lady’s tough response to the rioters was applauded by the public and gave her the mandate to carry out her agenda of fiscal conservatism. She implemented economic policies that led to the sale or closure of state-owned companies, deregulation of British industry and the financial sectors, flexibility in labor markets, and withdrawal of state subsidies. After a rough start, British GDP rose twice as fast as government spending for the first time since the 1920s. Thatcher demanded balanced budgets and refused to be suckered into adopting the euro currency. When Thatcher retired in 1990, the U.K. was considered a growth engine of Europe.

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From the Associated Press:

Ronald Reagan was hailed as “a great American hero” Monday as his admirers unveiled a 10-foot-tall (3-meter-tall) statue of the former U.S. president near the American embassy in London.

Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser and secretary of state in President George W. Bush’s administration, joined British Foreign Secretary William Hague at the morning ceremony in Grosvenor Square.

“Statues bring us to face to face with our heroes long after they are gone,” Hague said “Ronald Reagan is without question a great American hero; one of America’s finest sons, and a giant of 20th-century history. You may be sure that the people of London will take this statue to their hearts.”

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Conservative Republicans nationwide made a resounding comeback last Tuesday night, recapturing the majority in the U.S. House by picking up more than 60 seats – the biggest gains since 1948! In addition to the historic night in the House, Republicans added 6 seats in the U.S. Senate, 18 State House chambers switched, and there will be 11 new Republican governors starting in 2011.

President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and soon-to-be-ex Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi saw a repudiation of their irresponsible and out of touch left-wing agenda, and the comeback of a vibrant and hopeful conservative movement – with women leading the way.

A large number of Republican women ran for Congress this year – 51 to be exact – and those winning their races included Sandy Adams of Florida, Diane Black of Tennessee, Vicky Hartzler of Missouri, Jaime Herrera of Washington, Kristi Noem of South Dakota, and Martha Roby of Alabama, all of whom took over seats previously held by Democrats. They will join Fire from the Heartland cast members and incumbent Congresswomen Michele Bachmann, Cynthia Lummis, and Jean Schmidt in the House this January.

Some of the other notable GOP women who prevailed include rising stars Nikki Haley and Susana Martinez, the first female governors of South Carolina and New Mexico, respectively, and Kelly Ayotte, who trounced liberal Rep. Paul Hodes to become the junior U.S. Senator from New Hampshire.

When one traces the roots of the conservative movement, women have always served as its back bone.

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Margaret Thatcher nearly singlehandedly restored Britain from its cradle-to-grave welfare state to a thriving economy.  She believed that the socialism of her day was incompatible with the strong, productive, self-reliant, moral citizens she wanted the British people to be, and that freedom (economic and personal) was the only solution.  Her conservatism was a moral stance, not a technocratic one.

Our latest guest, author and journalist Claire Berlinski, talks about the Iron Lady, why she matters and what she stood for.  She suggests that were Thatcher and President Obama to meet, the former Prime Minister would “eat him for lunch.”  Even more surprisingly, Berlinski takes offense to the notion that Sarah Palin might be compared to Thatcher.  What are their similarities? “Sarah Palin is a woman; she’s from a small town; she’s a conservative.  The comparison ends there.”

Berlinski goes on to discuss her past 6 years living in Istanbul, moderate Muslims and moderate Islam, and why Americans should be paying more attention to Turkey.

Watch the full episode below:

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In today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech talk about Rahm Emanuel’s departure from the White House, the latest consumer spending numbers, and the upcoming college football weekend. We’ll also chat with Claire Berlinski about Margaret Thatcher and American economic policy.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment.com and Stephen Clouse and Associates. We’d also like to let you know that we’ve set up a standalone site at CoffeeandMarkets.com for easier browsing of our past broadcasts.

You can subscribe to the podcast by following the links above, and if you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Daily Caller: Rahm’s Departure, Plouffe’s Arrival
TNL: Tom Friedman Doesn’t Understand the Tea Parties
There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters
Read Claire Berlinski at Ricochet
Coffee and Markets Podcast Archive

The ink was barely dry on the $150 billion EU/IMF bailout of Greece when world stock markets tanked on two major fears. First, financial analysts are concerned that the bailout money won’t be enough to cover Greece’s borrowing needs from its out-of-control budget deficit. Second, there are fears that the EU/IMF deal will not be approved by the German parliament in a vote scheduled for Friday.

Additionally, there are new worries that the Greek debt contagion will spread to Spain and elsewhere in Europe. The looming specter of debt default and deflation is heavy in the air for investors worldwide.

Making market matters even riskier, German chancellor Angela Merkel faces key regional elections this Sunday in populous North Rhine-Westphalia, including the conservative areas of Cologne, Bonn, and Stuttgart. These cities hate government debt and overspending as much as the rest of Germany, if not more so.

The great postwar German leader Konrad Adenauer came from Cologne. He was a conservative Catholic who despised Nazism and Soviet communism. He also was an inflation fighter. To stop hyperinflation in the postwar period, Adenauer sponsored the new German mark and linked it to the dollar, which in those days was as good as gold.

Today, all of Germany still hates inflation.

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On Saturday morning, I was stopped short by a text message-  a plane crash had killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski and 96 others.  Immediately, I called and asked the location… Russia.

With tragic irony, the Polish Presidential delegation was wiped out while enroute to memorialize the 1940 Katyn Forest Massacre.  During World War II (April 1940), the Russians murdered 22,000 members of the captured Polish Officer Corps. On Stalin’s orders, the Russians killed captured Polish military officers, civil servants, and intellectuals, including lawyers, physicians, teachers, professors, engineers, priests, rabbis and other professionals.  By “liquidating” the Polish Officer Corps and much of the professional class, the Russians eased future “communization” of Poland.

The Russians had never apologized for the Katyn Massacre and for 50 years had denied culpability.  Scheduled for last weekend, the memorial event was meant to extend a hand and unclench a fist.  Instead, the Polish State aircraft crashed nearly at the same site.

Polish President Lech Kaczynski was hated by the Russians;  he was blunt, and a tough negotiator.  As a friend of Lech Walesa, member of Solidarity, and former mayor of Warsaw, President Kaczynski had been jailed while resisting communism.

The historic Polish motto, “Our Freedom is Yours”, is deeply ingrained in the national political culture.

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If I had a dollar for every time some tool during the health care debate brought up how “we’re the only industrialized” nation in the world without socialized health care I’d have a lot of money. Why, I could even retire from my current job of poisoning the environment and taking advantage of the working man. I could, you know, relax.

Even the U.K., the drones blather, has government run health care. I guess they think we can identify better with the U.K. because they’re mostly white and speak English. I don’t know. I won’t waste any time trying to figure out the left’s thought process. Doing so would be as dangerous and pointless as trying to decipher the Necronomicon.

Invoking the U.K. as a model should, naturally, have the opposite effect on the American psyche. I hate to bring it up, but we kinda fought a war a couple hundred years ago to insure that we were NOT just like England. We already had the English life. We were right there and we rejected it.

Think of all the things we missed out on, only to aspire to end up in the same place. Our fish and chips are inferior. Guinness served over here is never quite as fresh. We don’t have tea time. I really like tea. We also ditched the cool accents. I mean seriously, I could have sounded like Ian McKellan or Sean Connery if it wasn’t for those clowns Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

Thanks to the American Revolution we can’t claim Led Zepplin, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Arctic Monkeys, The Smiths, Blur or the Spice Girls as our own. James Bond is not our brother. Neither is Dr. Who. On top of it, I would probably be a Lord or Earl or something. Damn it, Lord Leigh Scott of Wauwatosa sounds freaking awesome! Thanks a lot Thomas Paine.

Jerks.

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Back in November, when Peter Robinson interviewed me for Uncommon Knowledge, he waited until the last segment to throw down the gauntlet, asking me bluntly why I was so much more sanguine regarding the future than was the estimable Mark Steyn. My reply, which caught him off guard, was what he jocularly called “a low blow.” For I said something like this: “Mark Steyn is a Canadian. What would you expect? I’d be a pessimist myself if I were a Canadian.”

I would not want to deny that my ad hominem argument struck a bit below the belt, but I nonetheless thought it apt, and I have not in any way changed my mind. Mark is a man of keen understanding and quick wit, and he bears comparison with George Will and Charles Krauthammer, the very best of our pundits. Moreover; as a Canadian who has lived in Great Britain, he has firsthand experience of the profound damage done by what I, echoing Alexis de Tocqueville, termed soft despotism in my recent book. When he writes, in a recent post, “ it’s hard to overestimate the magnitude of what the Democrats have accomplished,” he is surely right. Indeed, I agree with almost every word in the following:

Whatever is in the bill is an intermediate stage: . . . the governmentalization of health care will accelerate, private insurers will no longer be free to be “insurers”  in any meaningful sense of that term (i.e., evaluators of risk), and once that’s clear we’ll be on the fast track to Obama’s desired destination of single payer as a fait accomplis.

If Barack Obama does nothing else in his term in office, this will make him one of the most consequential presidents in history. It’s a huge transformative event in Americans’ view of themselves and of the role of government. You can say, oh, well, the polls show most people opposed to it, but, if that mattered, the Dems wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing. Their bet is that it can’t be undone, and that over time, as I’ve been saying for years now, governmentalized health care not only changes the relationship of the citizen to the state but the very character of the people. As I wrote in NR recently, there’s plenty of evidence to support that from Britain, Canada, and elsewhere.

More prosaically, it’s also unaffordable. That’s why one of the first things that middle-rank powers abandon once they go down this road is a global military capability. If you take the view that the U.S. is an imperialist aggressor, congratulations: You can cease worrying. But, if you think that America has been the ultimate guarantor of the post-war global order, it’s less cheery. Five years from now, just as in Canada and Europe two generations ago, we’ll be getting used to announcements of defense cuts to prop up the unsustainable costs of big government at home. And, as the superpower retrenches, America’s enemies will be quick to scent opportunity.

Longer wait times, fewer doctors, more bureaucracy, massive IRS expansion, explosive debt, the end of the Pax Americana, and global Armageddon.

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It isn’t often that matters of art enter the political news cycle. The Obama administration is determined to change that. Over the holiday week, Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government drew its readers’ attention to the ornamentation on the White House Christmas tree–in particular, an ornament featuring a picture of the Chinese dictator Mao Zedong.

This season’s Christmas decorations, recycled and reappropriated by “community groups” with ornaments from previous White House installations, were the brainchild of Simon Doonan, the Pop Art gadabout tapped by the White House for the occasion. Doonan is most well known for his controversial window displays at the Barneys New York department store, which have included dioramas of Margaret Thatcher in dominatrix wear and Dan Quayle as a ventriloquist’s dummy.

The news of the White House’s holiday hijink reached around the globe. The most interesting commentary came out of the smackdown between the art critic for the Los Angeles Times Christopher Knight and Breitbart. I have had my run-ins with Knight myself. On this occasion, Knight thought he outdid the right-wing commentators by making a distinction between any old portrait of Mao and “Andy Warhol’s ‘Mao ‘”—from which the White House ball derived.

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Happy Birthday to Margaret Thatcher!

In an age where style trumps substance in so many ways, few can be surprised that a fledging President would receive a Nobel Peace Prize.  It bears repeating that Obama was President for just a matter of days before the nomination process was closed.  Nevertheless, and without any substantive accomplishment, Obama was awarded the Prize – unanimously – apparently for things to come.  No wonder 58% of Americans believe that politics was behind the choice.

By contrast, consider the accomplishment of Ronald Reagan who, last I checked, did not receive the Nobel Peace Prize.  According to Margaret Thatcher, Reagan won the Cold War “without firing a shot.”   In the words of Henry Kissinger, it was “the most stunning diplomatic feat of the modern era.”  In the wake of that victory, millions upon millions of people were set free – and, as history has shown, a free people are far more likely to be a peaceful people.

So why didn’t Reagan get the Prize?  The answer is simple, the political Left, including the Nobel committee, didn’t like the way Reagan went about setting people free.   Reagan, we well remember, installed missiles in Europe.  He did so because he believed what Thomas Jefferson told us long ago:  “Whatever enables us to go to war, secures our peace.”  Reagan, in time, would modernize Jefferson’s wisdom by advocating “peace through strength.”

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From New York Times today:

Sarah Palin, in what was billed as her first speech overseas, spoke on Wednesday to Asian bankers, investors and fund managers.

A number of people who heard the speech in a packed hotel ballroom, which was closed to the media, said Mrs. Palin spoke from notes for 90 minutes and that she was articulate, well-prepared and even compelling.

“The speech was wide-ranging, very balanced, and she beat all expectations,” said Doug A. Coulter, head of private equity in the Asia-Pacific region for LGT Capital Partners.

“She didn’t sound at all like a far-right-wing conservative. She seemed to be positioning herself as a libertarian or a small-c conservative,” he said, adding that she mentioned both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. “She brought up both those names.”

Read the whole thing here.